In 2009, during my first winter in residence at Native Meadow, I performed a co-created physical text based play with the Performance Exchange Project entitled “Our American Ann Sisters”.
The H1N1 or swine flu made its first appearance that winter and was especially dangerous for small children. Two members of our ensemble had small children. We had spent a year creating and refining this show and only had a short 2 1/2 week run.
So when I got the flu near the end of our second week, I performed with a raging fever and clorox wipes instead of a fluttering lace handkerchief. “The show must go on” is never more true than in a small, lightly funded and understudy bereft theatrical troupe.
And then that second Friday, it began to snow. And snow. And snow. Rare for here, the results by Saturday morning were 20-24 inches. Those who live in the South understand that this is a rarity and also that when it does snow, even much less, everything shuts down completely.
Feverish and achy, when I drew open the curtains that Saturday morning and saw the snow, I surrendered and was very sick in bed for days. And this brings me, finally, to the flu falcon.
Just west of the house there stands a magnificent broad leaf pine, a solitary giant tree, and as I lay in bed and the deep snow stopped all plans, what appeared to be an unlikely Peregrine Falcon kept watch from that pine while fluffing itself against the bitter cold. This bird was a comfort in a deep delirious surrender.
Further research indicates it might have been a Sharp Shinned Hawk, that my identification skills, still weak, were wrong, but the comfort, the sense of communion and our dialogue as we both struggled to stay alive, was real and accurate.
Because of the meadows, the absence of chemical spray and no pest poison, Native Meadow is rich in raptors. Hawks, owls, maybe falcons, increasingly thrive here. Once even a pair of nesting bald eagles took up residence. We joke that Native Meadow is a hawk and owl farm that makes no money and in a sense, this is true.
The hawks love to sit in the meadow edge trees, especially any dead ones we leave standing for habitat and eye the meadow for prey. And thank goodness or we might be truly over run with field mice and rabbits.
The meadow has a low thatch that functions as a kind of subway, a below stalk nesting site for a myriad of creatures. For the raptors, the meadows are a deli. We see the hawks zooming back and forth over the tall grasses as if reading a menu.
Most times we only hear the dusk and evening owls though every time I go down to the bottom land and the wetlands this spring, I disturb and send flying the resident owls.
Observed here are Barred Owls, quite big at some 16-25 inches long and their query call that sounds like “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you ya’ll?” All feathers and with a wingspan of 38-49 inches, they weigh a mere 17-35 oz. They travel light.
I will never forget the first time I saw a Barred Owl take flight in dense woods. He is so big, his wingspan so wide, that crashing diaster seems inevitable. It isn’t and the skill of his weaving flight is something, once seen, one will never forget.
Heard too are the Great Horned Owl and the little Screech Owls with their descending cry best described by Mary Oliver as “fluttering/down the little aluminum/ladder of his scream”.
The path to actually seeing an owl is often to follow the ruckus of a “mobbing” when the crows seek to pester a big predator away from their nests. The Barred seems irritated but unafraid, daring the smaller birds to get close with a half open eye.
The association of owls and wisdom may have to do with their silent flight into darkness and that seems right. Too, their connection to the Greek goddess Athena and the Roman goddess Minerva, each associated with wisdom, poetry, love and later, war.
While I can’t really claim a totem or spirit animal as a non Native American, I can say that owls have always come to me in meditative trance, in dream, and as a consistent draw in any kind of prophetic card reading. Soon after I came to live here, a Barred Owl woke me in the night, calling from the ridge pole of my bedroom, sounding as if he were in the room. It seemed a welcome.
What a blessing to be in the right place, to create homes for the winged, to fly now silent into darkness.
Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard
His beak could open a bottle,
and his eyes - when he lifts their soft lids -
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder -
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation.
Never mind that he eats only
the black-smocked crickets,
and the dragonflies if they happen
to be out late over the ponds, and of course
the occasional festal mouse.
Never mind that he is only a memo
from the offices of fear -
it’s not size but surge that tells us
when we’re in touch with something real,
and when I hear him in the orchard
fluttering
down the little aluminum
ladder of his scream -
when I see his wings open, like two black ferns,
a flurry of palpitations
as cold as sleet
rackets across the marshlands
of my heart
like a wild spring day.
Somewhere in the universe,
in the gallery of important things,
the babyish owl, ruffled and rakish,
sits on its pedestal.
Dear, dark dapple of plush!
A message, reads the label,
from that mysterious conglomerate:
Oblivion and Co.
The hooked head stares
from its house of dark, feathery lace.
It could be a valentine.
-Mary Oliver from “Devotions”: The Collected Poems of Mary Oliver
Sources & More:
Performance Exchange Project: Our American Ann Sisters images: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pepcville/albums/7215762360923716
Hawks of Virginia https://avibirds.com/hawks-of-virginia/
The Eight Owl Types of Virginia and Where to Find Them. https://avibirds.com/owls-of-virginia/
Barred Owl Call: Cornell Lab https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Barred_Owl/sounds
Barred Voices: Cornel Lab of Ornithology:
Mobbing: https://www.audubon.org/news/mobbing-when-smaller-birds-join-forces-fend-larger-birds
Owl of Athena:Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owl_of_Athena
Totem on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totem